Written by Christopher Kelly
Jan. 12, 2018
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and today I'm delighted to be joined by Lindsay Taylor. Say hello, Lindsay.
Lindsay: Hi, Chris.
Christopher: I am very pleased to have you. Lindsay is from the Primal Blueprint team and Lindsay joined the team in 2015 as an expert writer and researcher on all matters of health, science and primal living. Lindsay earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill then packed her car and headed west to enroll at the University of California Berkeley.
There she completed her master's degree and Ph.D. in social and personality psychology with a focus on self-evaluation and goal pursuit. After graduating, Lindsay worked as a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley for several years before leaving the academic life to focus on raising her two young boys.
Primal living has long been important to her family ever since her husband brought home the first edition of the Primal Blueprint in 2009. She is delighted to have the opportunity to research and write about primal living professionally. Very cool. Congratulations on all of that, Lindsay.
Lindsay: Thank you. Yes, I still sometimes wake up and get to sit down and do my job and can't believe that this is my life.
Christopher: That's amazing.
Lindsay: It is.
Christopher: You have found your element as we talk about on the podcast here.
Lindsay: I have just like you have. I think that's why this is going to be a really fun conversation today because you and I both kind of took deep severe right hand turns in our lives that led us down completely different career paths that have turned out to just be amazing.
Christopher: Yeah, absolutely. Reinventing yourself is another way of putting that.
Lindsay: Completely. And I don't know if you have the same -- I guess, maybe your story involves a little bit more agency on your part but a lot of my story involves kind of just serendipity and being in the right place at the right time and being open to the universe, letting things into my life. I love my current job. It's really rewarding getting to work with all the people I work with through Primal Blueprint.
Christopher: That's awesome. Good for you. Talk about your former academic life. I'm really interested to know what it was about social and personality psychology that appeal to you?
Lindsay: Let's all take it back to -- Let's go back to high school. I was originally thinking when you're 15, 16 and people are asking you what you're going to do with your life, I thought I was going to go into microbiology and be a virologist. That was my plan. It was when the movie Outbreak came out and so I just really thought I would be working tracking down these disease epidemics and going in with my hazmat suit and then going into the lab and solving all these problems.
And then I took a Psych class in high school and it was just like -- It just turned on a light bulb in my heart and I was like, "Oh, this is actually what I really want to do." I think, just like everyone else, you're drawn to the things that are your innate skills. I've always really been interested in trying to understand why people make the choices they make and do the things they do.
And so social psychology is really all about explaining human behavior and how people interact with other people and how they interact with their environments and the factors that influence the decisions they make sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and everything about that just really floats my boat. I mean, that's just the things that I'm really innately interested in.
When I went to undergrad, I was really lucky that my -- Actually, it was a graduate student who was teaching my social psych class who asked me to be her research assistant on her graduate work project. And so I ended up being her research assistant and doing some interesting work with her and then it just kind of spiraled. By the end of my time at UNC I just decided, "Okay, this is it. Academic psychology is where I want to go. I'm going to conduct research for the rest of my life."
Ended up applying to all these schools and, again, just kind of serendipitously ended up at Berkeley. I applied to 13 different schools. Berkeley was the last one I applied to not on a whim but I was so burned out of the application process at that point that at one point I actually physically threw -- This was back when you put your application in a typewriter and type it.
I ripped it out of the typewriter very dramatically and just threw it across the room. I was like, "I'm not moving to California anyway. I've never even been to California." And then kind of gathered myself and picked myself up and put it back in the typewriter and typed it out and blah, blah, blah, ended up in Berkeley and ended up working with a bunch of amazing people there. But one of my main advisers, her name is Serena Chen, and she's still at Berkeley, and she was working on a concept of self-evaluation that was just exactly what I wanted to be working on and I had never heard of it before I got there.
Christopher: Wow, that's amazing.
Lindsay: That's one of those serendipity things. I just ended up working with her and she was working on this concept of self-evaluation and how you want other people to see you. I just started doing this work that just was so perfect for me and did that for years before I realized that the academic life was not what I actually wanted and walked away as you do.
Christopher: As you do, of course. Can you talk more about that system of self-evaluation? That sounds very interesting.
[0:05:01]
Lindsay: Yes. I'm sure we'll talk a lot about the self today because the self is kind of what underlies all of how I kind of understand how people make their decision processes. But, of course, we all have these different types of self concept or levels of self concept which are, of course, how we see ourselves, how we think we are, what we think our personality is like, how we think we're seen by other people and then kind of aspirational versions of it, like what I'd like to be like, how I'd like to have other people see me, how I'd like to be in the future.
And then how I'm afraid I will be in the future, how I would not like people to see me, these kinds of things. And so one of the things that's always been kind of personally important to me is feeling understood by other people. I get really upset when, I'm sure everyone does, but I feel like I'm acutely sensitive to when I feel like I've been misunderstood by somebody, where I feel like you do something and then later you find out that someone thought you meant one thing when you meant something entirely different or you find out that someone has an impression of you that completely does not match your impression of yourself.
And some people are just like, "Well, forgive that person." And I'm like, "No, I have to go talk to them and hunt them down and make sure they know that actually I'm like this." And so that's a process called self-verification. It's the behaviors that we engage in to get other people to see us as we see ourselves. And it's kind of like an accuracy or an authenticity motive.
So, that was a lot of what I worked on in graduate school was this idea of authenticity and what authenticity means and how people behave and structure their behavior in ways that are going to both feel authentic to them which is very important but then also are going to get other people to have what they perceive to be accurate impressions of themselves and how that relates to the goals they set and their psychological well-being and all sorts of other outcome variables.
Christopher: Is a list written up? Can I link to some papers in the show notes that I and other people listening can go and read later?
Lindsay: Yeah. I'll send you my CV when we're done. I have a couple of papers that you can link to that are completely different things but related on online dating and how people seek out partners that match themselves. That's a whole different podcast but, yeah, I'll send you some relevant papers by myself and other people and you can link to them.
Christopher: I've become increasingly interested in psychology and in particular behavior change because it seems to me that most problems in health can be boiled down to a behavior change problem. And it's really interesting when you dig into the literature you see the traditional establishment are talking about problems like getting patients to take their medication on time. Whereas, of course, you at Primal Blueprint and also at Nourish Balance Thrive, we're thinking about completely different things.
I think it's really interesting that there's this intersection of problems and this whole body of literature that describes some techniques that you can use in order to enable behavior change. Did your research influence the work that you do today at Primal Blueprint?
Lindsey: I definitely did. I mean, in a couple of ways. One is the variables that I manipulated in my dissertation studies was the way that people frame their goals. You can frame your goals in terms of an approach or an avoid orientation. This is probably a concept that you come across in your psychological reading. Basically, are you approaching a goal? Are you moving towards something? Are you framing your desired outcomes in terms of goal attainment like desirable goals? Or are you framing them in terms of things you would like to avoid?
This is, obviously, an oversimplification of this whole construct but we know, for example, that most people on average tend to pursue goals longer when they have an approach of orientation towards them. I focus a lot with the people I work with in terms of just literally what are the words they're using to talk about their goals. I guess, we should take a step back and I should say that, whereas you have a wonderful position where you get to work very intensely with people if not literally in person, on the computer and Skyping. You get to develop all these really deep relationships with people.
A lot of my work is through our online community at Primal Blueprint. We have an online community for endurance athletes on Facebook. That's called our Primal Endurance Community. That's about 2500 endurance athletes who all subscribe or at least interested in subscribing to the primal endurance method of training.
And then we have this incredible new group for Mark's new book, The Keto Reset Diet, and we have an incredible Facebook community that's just growing by leaps and bounds. I mean, we've had it for less than two months and we have 15,000 people in there now.
And so a lot of my job right now is working in those groups and helping these people but my relationship with them is, obviously, more peripheral than your relationship with your athletes just by virtue of the fact that most of these people I don't know in person. I only talk to them through Facebook.
[0:10:03]
The Keto Reset group, even though I feel like some of these people I know pretty well, I've really only known them for two months at this point max. I can't dig as deep. I can't be their therapist even though that's not the kind of psychologist I am anyway but I can't do this deep therapy. So, I'm doing this very low hanging fruit type interventions with them. One of the ones I really do a lot is just changing the language they use to talk about their goals.
So, when someone comes in and says, "I don't want this. I don't want that." Turn it around and say, "Okay, but what are you working towards? What do you want?" The kind of approach-avoidance motivation I think about a lot. But I do think about how to make things self relevant a lot. A lot of the people that I talk to in our group, first and foremost, come to us with weight loss goals.
Even if they are also trying to solve an autoimmune problem or they have maybe this kind of random couple of symptoms that maybe aren't a good diagnosable syndrome or disease but they just have a couple nagging things that are bothering them, the thing that people talk more than anything else is their weight. It's not that weight isn't important and that weight loss goals aren't valuable or valid but most people don't want to lose weight because their weight in and of itself bothers them.
It's because they perceive their weight as obstructing their progress towards another goal or they think that because they have, let's say, 50 pounds to lose, that they can't achieve what they would like in terms of subjective well-being because this weight interferes with that. A lot of it comes down to how they think they're being judged by other people. The problem is that I think a lot of people haven't really taken the time to sit down and really think about what it is they really want. They want to lose weight but they want to lose weight because, fill in the blank.
Christopher: Right. And you do your [0:12:01] [Indiscernible] and reasoning and eventually you get to the point where everybody says, "Because I want to be happy."
Lindsay: Right. And even then it's like, okay, and then, what does that mean? What does that mean to be happy? And so I really try to get everyone to think about -- This is all the work in progress but what are the deeply self-relevant goals or what are the attributes that you think you have that are not being fully realized right now because your weight is holding you back? What is the version of your ideal future self that you're trying to attain that you are discrepant from now, at least in part, because of your weight?
What is your ideal future self doing? What do they look like? [0:12:41] [Indiscernible] but how is your future life different in ways that are personally important to you and how can you be working towards that and let the weight loss be kind of tangential or incidental to that or just like one step in this bigger process as opposed to being the goal in and of itself, right?
Christopher: I get it. I get it. I've been thinking about this a lot and I realized that it's much, much easier to state what you don't want. If you're trying to figure out what you want, it's a lot easier to say what you don't want. And we see it so much. I saw that really fantastic -- Tim mentioned his -- I think he was accepting his degree. It was his acceptance speech.
Somebody rehashed it and edited it and put some background music and it was all over the internet last week. I'll link to it in the show notes because it was very nicely done. One of this things, it was the nine life lessons. One of his life lessons was to try and to find yourself in terms of things that you love. I thought that's a really interesting thing to think about because so many people they do the opposite.
Tim actually even mentions that. When people ask you what food I like, I tend to start talking about the things I don't link. And, of course, how common is that in our industry? I don't talk about the things that I do eat. I talk about the things that I don't eat. I don't eat carbs. I don't eat gluten. I don't eat refined oils. These things that we don't like. I'm not saying that everybody should just only define themselves in terms of the things that they love but it is an interesting thought experiment, don't you think?
Lindsay: It is. And I actually do that a lot. I think it's really important for food coming from a background in Primal Blueprint now that we're doing the keto book and a lot of people are finding us through keto who aren't familiar with the Primal Blueprint and with Mark and with Mark's Daily Apple, there's a lot. Whenever you start to talk about food there's a lot of what I don't eat, what's not allowed. People come in and say, "Is this food allowed in keto?"
It's like, "Well, you're a grownup. Everything is allowed." In my head I'd say you're a grownup a lot but when I type it, it sounds snarky and I mean it with kindness. You have agency in these decisions, right? But in terms of what is moving you towards the goals you want, what foods do you eat? What foods are good choices for you? I think this part of it though is that as a society we're taught not to brag and not to boast and not to talk about the things we're good at and that spills over into all areas of our life.
[0:15:01]
If you say what kind of athlete are you, I'm sure you get this a lot, "Well, I'm slow. I'm not very good. I'm kind of back of the pack." And then you look at the results and they're on the 30th percentile. And that's like, "Well, that's not back of the pack at all." But we're just not good at, we're not trained to talk about things in terms of positives or in terms of skills. We're trained to talk about things in self deprecating terms.
Christopher: It's interesting that Lesley Paterson, the triathlete and wife of Simon Marshall, who I've learned so much from recently, that she brought up similar concerns. She thought it was very much a British thing where you don't boast, you don't brag about what you've achieved. She would have terrible trouble telling people that she was a professional triathlete because it sounded like she was boasting. You say that that's a pervasive problem in the US also.
Lindsay: I think so. I'm actually in the middle of The Brave Athlete right now and I think it's such a great book and I'm actually -- It's ticking all my psychologist boxes. It's making me so happy with all this jargon. I think that people, even non-athletes, should read it because it is about honoring yourself and thinking deeply about these processes because, yes, in the US we are also taught not to be boastful.
I mean, I can't compare it to Britain because I was not raised in Britain but, I guess, we're kind of on the extremes, I would say. We're either very blowhardy boastful or we're very self-deprecating as a rule. I'm struggling that. Maybe you're having the same thing with your daughter but trying to teach my kids to feel good about themselves and be proud of their accomplishments but also be likable is a really hard thing.
I think we teach our children that being likable involves being humble and then being humble involves not even admitting to the things that you're good at and specifically the things that you do that you feel proud about. I think that's a real disservice to all of us but I don't know what the answer is because you can't just be the first one. Maybe you can, I guess, be the first one just going out there humbly talking about how proud you are about your accomplishments and seeing how that's received by the people around you.
Christopher: I think my daughter is a little bit too young. She's just turned four but no doubt we will get there. I know at the moment that my wife is doing an amazing job and I just don't want to mess with it. I'll be honest I'm pretty hands off just because she's doing such an amazing job. Our daughter is so articulate and she's so confident and everybody compliments her on her ability to speak. I just don't want to mess with that too much.
Lindsay: I would trust Julie too. She's pretty great. I think that's a pretty good parental strategy. Maybe you can write a book about it. You can call it Just Listen to Your Wife and I'll give a copy to my husband.
Christopher: Yeah. Be a New York Times bestseller after all.
Lindsay: Gosh, I want that so bad.
Christopher: Speaking of which, you just reminded me. We're recording this podcast on November the 15th and I'm pretty sure that November 14th was the release date for the audible version of The Brave Athlete. So, I read half of the book and then I thought I just don't have time to sit here and read this but I listen to lots and lots of books while I'm walking. Go check out the audible version of The Brave Athlete. I'm excited to do that now that you've mentioned it.
Lindsay: Yeah, definitely. It's a great book.
Christopher: Lindsay, talk about how you've discovered primal. Were you born that way? How did you meet Mark Sisson? How did it all go down?
Lindsay: I was definitely not born that way. I was raised in the Midwest in a very traditional -- My mom, who's probably going to listen to this, so hi, Mom. My mom was always into health. She's a nurse. It was the 80s. We did the low fat thing, the low fat high carb, butter substitutes, low fat muffins, the whole thing, as everyone pretty much did back then.
When I moved to California and started in grad school, I was on a grad student budget, of course. Just food was not at all at the top of my list of priorities and so food and health were always sort of peripheral to me. I had the kind of standard I want to look good and look healthy in my early 20s kind of deal but it was certainly not about health or longevity or inflammation or any of the things I care deeply about now.
I guess, this is, as long as we're giving total credit for our spouses for things, I should say that if it were not for my husband I probably would never have -- I might not ever have found this path. I always hear about all the things from him first. He's always three steps. I don't know how he does it but he is just on the cutting edge of everything.
He was talking about paleo. I mean, he knew about Art De Vany before Mark's book, before Robb's book. He was on the cutting edge. He brought home that first edition of Primal Blueprint and I was not into it. I just was like, "You're so weird. We're going to give up bread? Are you kidding me?" That time we were newlyweds and we had a new baby. We're eating normal American foods, making ravioli for dinner and Hawaiian rolls and whatever. I was commuting to Berkeley and finishing up my PhD and starting to work at Berkeley and I just couldn't do it.
[0:20:00]
And it really wasn't until -- I kind of slowly adapted it just because it was so important to him. But I would honestly say that it wasn't until my younger son was born six and a half years ago and I started doing triathlons that I really started to care deeply and think about my body as an athlete and also think about my body from the inside out instead of the outside in that the primal path became really important to me and I did a whole buy in.
So, it really took caring about my body as my body as a temple instead of just my body as the meat sack that carries me around and I wanted to look decent which is pretty much how I treated it for the first 30 years of my life and really caring deeply about health goals instead of appearance goals. Once I started doing that it was total shift. I went from kind of, "Fine, we'll do this" to "No, we're doing this. This is important. None of this. Let's clean out the cupboards." I've only become more and more -- My friends say I'm getting weirder and weirder.
Christopher: I know I'm getting weirder and weirder.
Lindsay: When you live in this world you do become weirder and weirder. You have to wear that as a badge of honor and just believe that, yeah, you're going to weird your way right to feeling great when you're 110 years old.
Christopher: And that weird is okay. It may be even encouraged.
Lindsay: It definitely took changing my focus on my body to wanting to nurture it as opposed to just wanting to beat it into submission to make primal really important to me.
Christopher: So, how do you make that transition happen using a book? I've always wondered about this, all these authors writing books hoping that knowledge alone is going to be enough to create behavior change. I would say good luck with that, as you've just demonstrated. How do you make that behavior change happen as it did for you through the writing medium?
Lindsay: As an author, I guess, or someone like Mark or you or Robb who are trying to make people buy into something that's really good for them but that you can't actually force them to do, I think it's a combination of educating them because I think a lot of the barrier to behavior change, certainly what I'm seeing with the people that I work with in our keto group, is a lack of confidence or a fear that they are going to do something wrong or they're going to mess something up or they're going to screw up their bodies.
And especially someone like us who's asking people to reject conventional wisdom, not do what their friends are doing, not maybe do what their doctors are telling them, not do what they see in the popular media, there is an element of just helping people gain the self-confidence to try something new. That's partly just education and just reinforcing the message over and over and getting people over the hump where they feel like this isn't just a hack or a gimmick. This is backed up by science. This is well researched. This person doesn't just want this. This person isn't just trying to sell books. This person has an authentic desire to help me.
I do think that Mark is really good at that especially with Mark's Daily Apple where he publishes an article literally every single weekday. I think that people understand that Mark genuinely wants to help people. And so that's part of it is conveying your authentic desire to help people, is a big part of the buy in. And then the other thing is the thing we're talking about earlier which is that if someone is going to make a giant change it really has to be self-relevant. It has to serve a goal or a need that is important to how you deeply see yourself.
Christopher: Or a problem is the word I would use.
Lindsay: You think so?
Christopher: I thought so, yeah. Everybody has a problem that they want to solve. Humans are motivated by problems.
Lindsay: Right. The problem might just be that you're not living the version of your life that you see for yourself, that your current life is not congruent with your ideal life. And that's a big problem. I think probably almost everybody has that problem to some degree, not to mention, of course, all the myriad health problems that you and I see all the time.
We know that goals that are intrinsically motivated are much more motivating and people are much more likely to stick to them and things are extrinsically motivated and people tend to use those terms incorrectly, lay people. They tend to think that intrinsic motivation are just things that you really care about and that extrinsic motivation is stuff that other people tell you to care about.
Christopher: Interesting.
Lindsay: That's not really what it means. I mean, you can deeply, deeply want something because somebody else told you to want it. So like when you're a kid, if your parents tell you, "You need to get a good report card and we're going to go to Disney World or whatever or I'm going to be really disappointed in you," you as a child may not really super be motivated by school but you may just deeply hold that goal just because you don't want your parents to be mad at you. That's not intrinsically motivating. Intrinsic motivation is a goal that aligns with or serves some deeply held notion of your self-concept.
[0:25:05]
So, that's the trick when you're trying to help someone make behavior change, or when Mark is writing a book or Robb or Mark and Brad are writing Primal Endurance, we're trying to reach all these people whose self-concepts and goals and whatever can be quite desperate but trying to help them figure out what it is about this particular behavior change or adopting this set of goals or adopting this set of beliefs that are going to be self-relevant.
And that's something that everyone has to do for themselves and it's hard. A lot of people don't do it. That's why a lot of people, I think, at least one of the reasons why a lot of people don't successfully pursue goals even if the goals themselves are really important to them.
Christopher: Can you describe Mark Sisson for us? There's a small chance that some people listening will not know who Mark Sisson of marksdailyapple.com is. Can you describe him for us?
Lindsay: So, probably a lot of people know Mark's story. Mark was a very high level elite athlete in the early '80s and he had all these really intense endurance goals. He was going to try out for the Olympic team, I think in '84, in the marathon. I think his marathon PR is something unbelievable to me, like 2:18. Then he switched to triathlon and placed fourth at Kona one year.
He was an incredibly fit high level athlete and at the same time was completely breaking himself down and ended up leaving the professional athlete's circle, end up going into coaching actually, because his body just was broken. That inspired him to take a step back and look at why did this happen to me? How is it that I could be theoretically so healthy and so fit and doing all the right things according to what I was taught, according to the books I'm reading and yet be so completely messed up by my pursuit of athletic excellence?
And so he along with again other people who are thought leaders in this field like Art De Vany and Robb, all landed on this ancestral health approach where you ask the question: What inputs do my genes expect in order to give me the healthiest returns, to keep me healthy, to keep me active, to keep me feeling good, to help me live as long as possible and not just have an incredible lifespan but an incredible health span where I'm old and I feel great?
Because that's all of our goal, right? We don't want to just be old but also sitting on a rocker waiting for someone to bring us pudding. We want to be old and hiking in the mountains and riding our little bikes around and socializing with our other 120 year old friends.
Christopher: I want to be like Mark physically. And maybe mentally too. I'm not sure about emotionally but definitely physically. Can you describe his physical presence?
Lindsay: Mark is, I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot, like just who are the people that become the gurus, right? It's no surprise that Mark became the guru because Mark has the charisma. When Mark walks into a room, we hear people going, "Oh, that's Mark Sisson." Going to Paleo f(x) for the first time last year which is, for people who don't know, it's called Paleo Conference but really it's more of like an ancestral health conference.
A lot of the people there don't identify as paleo per se. Mark doesn't identify as paleo. He identifies as primal. Chris Kresser is always there. He is kind of more just generally, I would say, ancestral health than paleo per se. People want to meet Mark. Mark is a big deal. And part of the reason is, like I said earlier, Mark's been publishing Mark's Daily Apple, his blog, for I think almost around 15 years now.
It's incredible. And even I who feel like I know, obviously, quite a lot about this space and have a good level of expertise about a lot of things, someone will come onto our board and be like, "Oh, such and such ingredient, is that okay?" I'd be like, "Ugh." And I will go to Mark's Daily Apple and Google psyllium husks or whatever.
Inevitably there's four articles about it. There's an article and three Mark answers, Q&A type thing about psyllium husks. I'd literally never gone to Mark's Daily Apple and not found the answer I was looking for. He really comes across as someone who is genuinely interested in health. It sounds really cheesy but his motives seem pure, you know what I mean?
And so people really respond to that. He's had incredible success. Primal Blueprint has sold hundreds of thousands of copies over the years and now he has The Keto Reset, which is a New York Times bestseller and he's got all sorts of other books and our community is just an incredible group of people. I love interacting with our community every day.
Christopher: You know what I respond to is that picture of him with his shirt off on a stand up paddle board. I mean, screw the rest. We talked about vanity earlier and how it motivates people. That's what people really want is, "I want to look like Mark Sisson when I'm in my 60s."
[0:30:04]
I want whatever he's doing, whatever he's eating, with all this Primal Kitchen food. There's a whole bunch of it in my kitchen right now. We've got the book. We're drinking the Kool Aid. I just want whatever Mark is having. That's what motivates me.
Lindsay: Yeah, totally. And you know what? The thing is too, one of the things that I think a lot of people like about Mark is that he is not apologetic about wanting all these different things. If you go into Mark's Daily Apple and search for LGN which stands for looking good naked, you could find all sorts of stuff because that's part of the goal too.
You could have these big aspirational "good goals" about, "I want to be healthy. I don't want to have inflammation." But you can also want a six pack and that's fine too. I mean, for me, that's not a great goal because I don't think I could ever have a six pack in a healthy way no matter what I do. Mark was blessed with good genes. Anyone who can run a 2:18 marathon is genetically gifted as well.
Mark works hard for his six pack and he actually -- The other thing that people like about Mark too is he lives what he preaches. He talks about his ultimate Frisbee game every game. That's not a joke. He literally plays ultimate Frisbee every weekend as far as I know. He is doing the thing. He is living the life. He is doing the things that he's telling people to do. But I wouldn't get too emotionally invested in that six pack, I'm saying.
Christopher: Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking the same thing that there's a Primal Kitchen about to open in Santa Cruz and I'd been watching the Instagram feed and the guy that's running it is trying to sell it like a conventional restaurant, "Come here, buy our food because it's super tasty." I think that's a terrible mistake. If I was marketing that restaurant, I'd be just posting the same picture of Mark with his stand up paddle board over and over again, "Come to my restaurant. You can eat what this guy eats."
Lindsay: Yeah, I'll talk to Mark about it. I mean, Mark certainly is not afraid of posting pictures of himself with his shirt off so I'm sure that maybe we could work that in. But the whole primal promise is kind of a blend of look great now and still look great in 50 years. And also keep feeling great. The appearance part is not absent from it at all.
The appearance part in having the six pack is kind of incidental too. If you're healthy these things manifest, maybe not a full six pack but the outside matches the inside. It's just a question of which direction are you going, inside out or outside in?
Christopher: Right. I feel like I've done both actually. When I was really sick I still had a six pack and it wasn't worth it. I didn't feel good. And now I'm definitely not as ripped as Mark but, yeah, I feel like it's just a side effect. It's definitely not something I'm striving for.
Lindsay: I know. I struggle with this myself because I definitely do not have a six pack but I feel like--
Christopher: Yeah, it's just weird when a woman has a six pack. I'm sorry. It's just weird.
Lindsay: You think so?
Christopher: Yeah, definitely. It's just weird.
Lindsay: Oh, good. It's good to know because that will be one way I'm not weird then. It's hard to know. And I think this is actually, going back to our conversation about goal setting, sometimes it's really hard to know what goals are reasonable for you. We know that social comparison is bad but at the same time it's one of our only tools that we can really get to set goals.
If I am doing my first half marathon, how do I know what a reasonable goal is, right? Besides just finish, which of course is always a reasonable goal. If I want to train for something, what do I do? I look at other people who maybe are kind of my same age and maybe have a similar body type and I say, "Oh, that person ran like a 1:45. I can probably do that."
But for me, Lindsay, the reality is I can't run a 1:45 half marathon, at least not without incredible speed work and training and making that my whole life goal. 1:45 is pretty far from where I am right now. That's make it not a realistic goal. It's really hard to know. I want to set goals that are realistic and attainable but also aspirational and people get so bugged down. It's really hard.
And especially with appearance goals and weight goals. People get this number om this head like, "Oh, I should weigh whatever, 140." You probably see this with your athletes a lot. They come into you and they say, "I should," fill in the blank. I should be able to perform at this level. I should weigh this much. I should be a size this. And I don't know. What do you tell people when they say that to you? Because I have a real problem with the word should.
Christopher: Yeah. So, I mean, Simon Marshall talked about this on our podcast together. It's the danger, the trap of the constant horizon seeking. I'll be happy when I hit this body composition goal. I'll be happy when I hit this time. And, of course, when never comes. You're constantly seeking the next horizon. And when you look at the most successful people, when I say successful I mean, the people who are most satisfied with the situation, they are process driven.
When I interviewed Jeremy Powers and Katie Compton, two national cyclocross champions, they just love riding their bike and they love doing cyclocross. It's not about times or body compositions or percentages or anything like that. They just are in love with the process of riding their bikes. And, obviously, they're competitive but really it's about the process. I feel I've just been lucky I've never really thought about this but I'm exactly the same. I don't really care about time. I'm going to go as hard as I can and see if I can beat that guy over there. It's really as simple as that.
[0:35:09]
Lindsay: I'm the same. I don't care about my times very much. I mean, it's not that I care a zero but it's really low down on the hierarchy of things I care about. That's one of those things where it's like I think this is true in any area of life, the things that kind of come naturally to you just feels so easy like, "Oh, I just don't care about that. I just don't care about time. I don't care about times. You shouldn't care about times."
But we know that all these people care deeply about times and it feels really dysfunctional often on some level. I mean, you can tell if it's dysfunctional for someone. If it's not serving them it's very obvious. But just saying this one, just care about something else. Just don't worry about that. That's not important. When it feels deeply important to them it's worth saying but it's not the answer, that you really have to help people. If you're going to take away that goal you have to replace it with another goal.
But I agree. I mean, we know in psychology that process oriented goals are "better" than outcome oriented goals in terms of being motivating and helping people stick to the goal pursuit process. That process is really important but both when it comes to health and when it comes to athletics, when people talk about it, what do they talk about? They talk about the outcomes. Society tells you that the outcome is what ultimately matters. And it's a hard sell to be like, "No, just go enjoy the process."
Christopher: Right. Of course, we fall into this trap. Last week, I was looking at Volek's new study which I'll link to in the show notes. Immediately I'm looking at the results table and groaning saying, "Oh god, there was only 16 people in this group. Why doesn't he just give me all of the data rather than showing the mean average? Really annoying."
And so, obviously, I'm just caring about the outcome. But what's not written about is like how much fund that these guys have whilst doing this experiment? Would you have rather been in the low carb group eating a ton of rib eye steak or would you rather been in the always hungry high carb group? No one really talks about that stuff.
Lindsay: No. They really don't. And also there's just like a real lack of permission to not care about things. If you go out and you say, "I genuinely don't care about my time," then people are like, "Oh, you're [0:37:13] [Indiscernible]." And then you go like, "Oh, you just." And we need as a society to give people permission to not care about these things because I really believe that most of the people who are participating in these sports wouldn't do it if they didn't enjoy it genuinely on some level.
Christopher: Of course.
Lindsay: Obviously, the vast majority of your time, even if you're a pretty serious racer, what maybe 90% of your time maybe, I don't know, let's do the quick math, more than 90% of your time on your bike around your feet or whatever is during training. So, why can't we have permission to value that process more than the race day? It's so silly to me.
Christopher: Absolutely. Well, let's shift gears and talk about the ketogenic diet because I was very excited to meet you at Chris Kresser's book launch. Chris has a new book called Unconventional Medicine that I just finished listening to actually. There's an audio book version available for that and it's very good. I would highly recommend it.
I met Lindsay along with the rest of my team. Tommy was there. Megan was there. Julie was there. We met Lindsay and we were super excited to meet you because, well, for many reasons. One of the reasons was that you were a woman eating a ketogenic diet and doing great which is something we never see.
Lindsay: I am all three of those things.
Christopher: So, Lindsay looks fantastic and she's got this huge mane of hair. That's one of those things to me that just screams good health. It maybe just me feeling a little bit inadequate. I've got very fine, like a fine dusting of cat hair. Unfortunately, my daughter Ivy has inherited the same genetic curse. It's kind of the same. It's now shoulder length but you can count each individual hair. It's like I feel bad for her.
But, yeah, it's just wonderful to see someone looking so radiantly healthy and eating a ketogenic diet which is something that we never see. But then you have to remember that we have a self-selecting population who maybe heard me speak on the Keto Summit a year ago. If it was working great, same is true I think with a lot of things in the internet, so with the reviews.
If you buy something fairly inexpensive from Amazon.com and it works the way that you'd expect you don't generally go on to the internet and leave a review about it saying, "Oh, I bought this light bulb and sure enough it lit up the room and it lasted for six years and I think I got my money's worth." If you buy a light bulb and in your eyes it doesn't work out the box you're going to go onto the internet and leave a review for it. You really have to watch out for this negative bias. But perhaps the first thing I should ask you about the keto diet is who are you and what are your goals?
Lindsay: Like I said, I had a real mental and life shift when I started. I basically went from a person who worked out at the gym and I would go to my little zumba class and my weightlifting class. I just really wanted to be not fat. That was basically my goal.
[0:40:06]
This is going to be relevant to this whole thing. But I'm a person who just kind of dispositionally has confidence that things are going to work out. It's some blend of self-confidence and optimism, I would say. And so after my second baby was born I was just like, "I think I could do a triathlon." Nothing about my past suggested I should be doing triathlons. I was neither a swimmer nor a biker nor a runner. I had done one half marathon five years before and it was something of a disaster.
But I just got this idea in my head that this was something I could do. I'd taken that same kind of attitude of this blend of optimism and self-confidence throughout my training and my diet also although let's just qualify we all hate the word diet. It's not a good word but I'm going to keep saying it for the rest of this podcast probably because we don't have a better word and way of eating is awkward.
I really want to train in a way and eat in a way that feels balanced to me. Balance is very important. I don't like pushing my body to extremes to the point where I'm not feeling well and I'm not performing well anymore. I don't want to eat foods that make me not feel well but nor do I want to super deprive myself of things and go so far into the weird zone that I can't socialize anymore.
With my job, I want to work enough hours that I am making a real contribution and that I'm valuable to Mark and to Brad but I also don't want to miss out on my kids' stuff. So, balance is my under arching goal in everything I do. I train and I take my training seriously. It's important to me and I don't just sleep through my runs or whatever. But at the same time I don't get so invested in them that I do things that I think might push the boundaries of health. And same thing with my diet. I think that's one of the reasons that I've been able to be successful both with my training and my keto diet is that I'm always doing them with an eye to health first and performance second.
Christopher: Wait. How is the ketogenic diet balance? You've almost completely eliminated a entire macronutrient. That doesn't sound balanced to me.
Lindsay: It isn't balance in the sense that you don't eat a lot of carbs but I eat an incredible variety of foods still. I should mention that I was primal for five-six years before I even started dabbling in keto and I was actually probably accidentally keto last year without meaning to be when I was training for an Ironman which again also sounds not very balanced at all.
I was training for an Ironman and I was eating a very whole food primal diet and probably eating on average of 100 to, somewhere between 75 and 125 grams of carbs a day which for Ironman training probably is a ketogenic diet. But like I said, I just eat a ton of different foods and the foods I don't eat aren't foods I want to eat anyway. And if I do want to eat a food I eat it.
So really the difference for me between if I'm intentionally eating keto versus if I'm eating what I call a normal diet but which is not normal by American standards is that when I'm keto I don't eat sweet potatoes and I rarely eat fruit except berries. But other than that, I eat the same thing year round which is like probably 20 to 30 different types of vegetables a week, all different sorts of meats, eggs. I make homemade kefir for gut health.
I drink kefir every single day regardless. I drink a ton of bone broth, all these foods that -- My diet feels very balanced to me because it's all foods I genuinely love eating. Balance is also partly just about -- It's a mental state, right? I don't feel restricted, therefore, I am balanced basically.
Christopher: Okay. Walk me through a day of eating. Can you describe exactly what you eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner or maybe you don't eat one of those meals?
Lindsay: No, I do. I'm an eater. I mean, I enjoy occasional intermittent fast. I do not intermittent fast every day and I'm sure we'll come back to this in a minute I'm sure. But because I am a female endurance athlete I do not intermittent fast every day but I do try to do what Rhonda Patrick taught me which is have a 12-hour window overnight where I don't consume any calories.
But after that, it's kind of different. If I'm running in the morning, I do my morning runs fasted. They're usually about an hour or so, so that's pretty easy to do, fasted morning run. And then I'll usually have my first proper meal between 9:00 and 10:30 and I don't eat breakfast foods partly because if I eat eggs too much I develop a sensitivity to eggs, I think. I break out and I look like a 38-year old teenager and it's not cute. I will usually have leftovers from the night before for breakfast like yesterday. And I post all my food on Instagram, by the way, if people want to come see how I--
Christopher: Yeah, we do. I'll link to that in the show notes.
Lindsay: You could link to my Instagram. Yesterday I had a sauté of beef heart, mushrooms, asparagus and kale and a serving of beet and cabbage sauerkraut and a glass of kefir. That was my breakfast.
[0:45:07]
Christopher: Oh my goodness. That's like primal foods, top crops. That's the T-rex of primal.
Lindsay: I was so proud of myself when I posted it on Instagram. I was congratulating myself all over the place. I was like, "Look at me, you guys. I checked every box. This is as good as it gets. I will be accepting my award later today." And then I drink coffee in the morning and I eat some sort of fat and I eat usually like a little bit of butter or heavy cream but I don't do a proper fatty coffee and part just because I've done some ketone testing and I haven't found that MCT oil really boost my ketones and that's really why you do MCT oil just for ketone production and I haven't found it super useful for me. Rather than spend the money I just mostly don't bother although I did do MCT oil this morning on the off chance it would make sound smarter during our podcast.
I occasionally do coffee. And then same thing. I usually eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch and dinner. Most of my meals involve some sort of sauté scramble of meat and vegetables I happen to have in my fridge. I try not to snack although depending where I am on my training so I do get hungry and if I'm hungry I eat for the most part.
So, I'll have a spoonful of almond butter and a mug of bone broth in the afternoon maybe. I love drinking bone broth when I am hungry between meals. Yeah, dinner is usually some sort of roasted meat and veggies. I go through periods when I track my food if I'm running an experiment on myself but for the most part I feel like I know how to eat and so I don't track my food unless I'm actually working towards a very specific goal or if I'm concerned that I've been eating not enough food I will track for a while just to make sure my calories are sufficient.
Christopher: That's interesting. That's something that we get our athletes to do especially the women seem to do this. I hate to draw that divide but it's true. And so that's interesting. You're actually tracking to make sure that you're eating enough.
Lindsay: Yeah, I do, because it's so hard and there's so much conflicting information out there and the truth is when it comes to keto diet we're still learning so much. Because we always look at it from a medical perspective for epilepsy and MS and other neurological problems and now all of a sudden the idea that keto for performance and keto for athletes is just this huge new thing and so I really love--
I was listening to your podcast with Dr. Bryan Walsh the other day and he was talking about this idea of what do we think we know now that we don't really know that turned out to be wrong. And I think about this a lot because I don't want to give advice to people that's going to turn out to be blatantly wrong in ten years.
And so much is turning out to seem to be blatantly wrong. Just the things that we followed in my lifetime, right? But at the same time I do feel pretty confident in this kind of whole category of if you eat real foods, if you eat enough foods then you'll be fine. And so I really think about this principle Dr. Walsh was talking about, the first do no harm. And so, for me, it's hard because when you think about it from a general health and longevity perspective we know that overeating is not good for longevity and we know that calorie restriction and Mark talks a lot --
Mark is 30 years older than me, right? His goals are a little different. He talks a lot about caloric efficiency and he thinks about it in terms what is the minimum effective dose of calories that I need to get through my day to perform like I want, to play ultimate Frisbee, to get out of my paddle board, all the things he's really truly in his life is still doing.
But at the same time he is thinking about the aging process and longevity probably first and foremost. And so, for me, those things are important but my more acute daily needs are performance and general health. And so although the idea of a caloric efficiency and not having to eat is really appealing to me I think first and foremost, and I talk all the time in my groups about the concept of allostatic load or stress bucket.
I know that I'm filling my stress bucket by being an endurance athlete. Mark will tell you, even though we have this Primal Endurance group and he was a former endurance athlete, to be really healthy you should not be an endurance athlete. We know endurance athletics are not the healthiest way to exercise. We know that it's not what our genes expect and yet we stubbornly continue to sign up for 50ks or whatever.
I know that I'm filling my stress bucket. I'm putting myself under allostatic load with my training even if I train as responsibly and as intelligently as I can and do the recovery bit. And so for me I really, more than caloric efficiency, I think about calories in terms of not adding to my allostatic load. For me, I think about it as more not as a minimum effective dose for longevity but like what is the threshold I need to attain so that I'm not overflowing my stress bucket if that makes sense.
Christopher: Yeah, it does, and it comes back to the first question which is who are you and what are your goals and understanding Mark's context.
[0:50:03]
It's very difficult when you're talking on a podcast or writing in a book or on a blog. You don't know who's reading that, who are they and what are their goals? I think that sometimes his context is misunderstood.
Lindsay: Right. And same thing I heard Dr. Tamsin Lewis interviewed on a podcast. I can't remember which one I was listening to now that she was on. And she said that she has literally never seen a female endurance athlete do well on keto.
Christopher: Right.
Lindsay: And I believe I am. But, I mean, that's the thing. I'm not saying that Dr. Lewis would say this but maybe kind of by her standards I'm not an athlete or I'm not what she means when she says female endurance athlete. I 100% believe that she is faithfully reporting her experience that every athlete that comes to her that's trying to do keto has burned out.
But again, just like with the Nourish Balance Thrive crowd, that's a self select group of people. I am not going to seek out the services and pay the money to go get Dr. Tamsin Lewis to help me because the product that she delivers, the coaching she delivers is outside what I need given the kind of athlete I'm trying to be. I'm comfortable dialing back the intensity of my training or I'm not trying to push boundaries. I'm just trying to be out there and have fun and do what I consider to be kind of an acceptable level of performance and a realistic level of performance for me.
Again, context is super important. I'm doing well on keto so far and I'd been doing it for, intentionally doing keto for about six months now. But like I said, kind of accidentally doing keto before that and doing primal low carb high fat eating for years before that. And I'm doing great because before performance always comes health.
And so I am absolutely comfortable not trying to break down these barriers and sacrifice my health in the process. And a lot of people are. I'm sure a lot of people that come to you are people who have dug themselves a hole because they were really trying to push the limits and just stay right on that edge of what they could realistically and healthfully do and they didn't successfully skirt the edge. They fell right over the cliff, right?
Christopher: Right, of course. Yeah. And it's always complicated. It's never just about performance. There's many things that interact to produce the final result but, yeah, of course the pushing yourself from the performance scale is one of those things we saw.
Lindsay: For sure. I don't think everyone has to do keto, by the way, just as Mark does not think everyone has to do keto. If you force me to put everyone in the world on the same diet it would be some version of low carb high fat primal. But that doesn't mean everyone has to go keto or has to be as extreme as I am either for performance or weight loss or for most goals that aren't, except for maybe if you have a neurological disease that has a metabolic, mitochondrial dysfunction component or metabolic component or cancer or something like that.
&nnbsp; But for the average person with kind of average health problems and average weight goals, keto is just something you can try but it's not something you have to do for sure.
Christopher: Do you eat when you're not hungry?
Lindsay: I don't eat when I'm really not hungry. If food really doesn't interest me then I'm not going to eat. But like I said, I do make sure that over the course of three or four days I've eaten enough calories and protein to make sure that I'm not digging a hole because I have done experiments on myself where I went or did a fairly low caloric load, what you would maybe consider typical keto macros.
If you go online and you can go to different sources and you can put in your height and weight and blah, blah, blah and your weight loss goals and they'll spit you out some macros. And so I went to a bunch of them and I put in -- If I was a person my height, my weight, my current body fat percentage and I wanted to lose weight and I got some macros and a couple of them had me eating 1200 and 1300 calories a day which is incredibly low I think for anyone but especially for a female endurance athlete but I have a sedentary job.
I mean, I sit at my computer. Even though I stand and I move and switch positions during the day my job is sedentary. I tried eating 1270 calories a day for five days and even at the end of five days I was dragging. And so I know that eating enough calories is important. I don't need to eat 2000 calories every single day. I might eat 1700 one day and 2200 the next and 1800. I mean, comfortably I land around 1900 a day. I would say, 1875, 1900 on average if I just kind of track what I eat without controlling it.
Christopher: Okay. Do you mind telling us how much you weight so I can work out the number of calories per pound?
Lindsay: I don't mind telling you how much I weigh but I will qualify that if anyone from my group is listening to this I generally don't tell people what I weight only because I don't want people to think like that is the right weight although I don't mind telling you. I am 38 years old. I am 5'6", 5'5", let's say, and I weigh 135 pounds. I think my body fat percentage is low 20s somewhere, like 22-ish although I haven't had a proper DEXA scan. This is just like skin caliper maybe body fat percentage, like 22-23. So, I did your calculations last night, and according to you I should be eating, I think, 2025 calories a day as a baseline.
[0:55:13]
Christopher: Right. And that's before your endurance activity.
Lindsay: I know. So even then, I'm still -- I mean, the struggle is real. The struggle is real trying to figure out the right answer because I've also eaten -- I also did an experiment where I ate, I kept my protein and carbs at what we recommend in Keto Reset, which is 50 grams of carbs a day mostly from vegetables, and my protein I was keeping at 80 grams per day which is about like 0.8 grams per pound in body mass for me.
Then I made it so that my diet was 80% fat which meant I had to eat 245 grams of fat a day and it put me at something like 2500 calories. I didn't feel full like I expected to. But I didn't feel better or worse either. When we come back to this kind of idea like self confidence and the thing I said really early on about when you're trying to help people do behavior change and a big barrier is lacking the confidence that they know what to do, the truth is that even I am not 100% sure what I'm doing. I'm still trying.
Christopher: Absolutely. I mean, whenever you meet someone that's 100% sure of what they're doing then run for the hills because without uncertainty how could that person ever refine their opinions when new evidence appears if they're 100% certain of what they're doing.
Lindsay: Right, but people are so uncomfortable with uncertainty, aren't they?
Christopher: I'm okay with not knowing, frankly.
Lindsay: I am too. But now look at our jobs? Our jobs are helping other people. And I think there's something to that. The people who are uncomfortable with the uncertainty are the people who struggle less on a day to day basis, I think. I know I don't know exactly what I'm doing but at the same time I'm comfortable enough knowing that I'm trying and that I think that the variables I'm using to kind of do my calculus every day are the right variables.
And whether or not they're spitting out the exact right answer I feel like for myself I'm close enough to the right path. Even if I'm not exactly on it I can see it and I'm not going to get totally lost out here in the woods. Inspiring that confidence in other people that there are at least half adjacent even if they're not walking at it exactly is probably the hardest part of my job I would say.
Christopher: You're reminding me there's a phenomenal book called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. In that book, Richard P. Feynman -- Of course, he talks about pleasure of finding things out but he also talks about being okay with not knowing and living with uncertainty. It's such an amazing book. All of the books about him are just absolutely incredible.
Speaking of which, Brad kindly sent me a copy of the Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever by Mark Sisson. Tell me about the book. I didn't get to read it because I get sent quite a lot of books I have to say and I don't really read paper books, as I said earlier. I listen to them on audible and then I buy the Kindle version so I can search in it later on.
It just so happened I had a friend whose parents had recently made this decision to try ketone. I thought, "Oh, how wonderful. I should send them this book that I've just received because it's the most up to date thing that I have." Tell me about the book.
Lindsay: Okay. I mean, just taking a step back, everything that Mark does is rooted in his concept of the primal blueprint which we kind of talked about earlier but basically it's the ancestral health perspective, it's about how to give your genes the best possible input to maximize health and longevity. The Primal Blueprint is not just about diet. It's about diet and movement and exercise and lifestyle factors like sleep and sunlight and play and using your brain and how all those things will kind of lead you on this path to optimum health.
And so The Keto Reset is really rooted in the Primal Blueprint in that it wants you to focus on the foods that are going to be the best for your genes. And so what the Keto Reset does is it walks you through we call a 21-day reset although you may choose to stay there for longer but that's when you are changing your diet from including SAD, standard American diet foods, and inflammatory oils and all the things that are typical of a modern diet.
And so, basically, it first walks you through kind of a Primal Blueprint transformation where you clean up your diet, you get rid of the foods that don't serve your genes well and you start learning how to base your diet around meat and vegetables and nuts and seeds and some fruit and eggs and high fat dairy and occasional dark chocolate and all the things that we primal people eat.
And then it takes you through a midterm exam where you basically figure out how you're doing. The purpose of the midterm exam is more or less to figure out if you're on the road to becoming fat adapted or if you're feeling good. And if it does seem like you're on the road to being fat adapted and you're starting to learn how to burn fat for fuel and you're feeling well then you move on to the keto part of the book which essentially, like I said, is really just dropping the carbs down but otherwise keeping your diet more or less the same.
[1:00:05]
And so then you just drop your carbs to 50 grams per day, you focus on those 50 grams coming from vegetables and maybe some nuts and then you just kind of track your subjective measures of how you're feeling. The idea is that a lot of people are afraid of keto because they hear about the keto flu and the transition is awful and it really doesn't have to be.
It's kind of like slowly weaning yourself off carbs but then also learning about the kinds of foods that you can use to replace the carbs that really serve your health. And you can stay feeling really good and transition to keto at the same time. That's what really makes the Keto Reset different from other keto programs that kind of violently throw you into keto and just tell you to ride it out and also, by the way, have sugar free jello and sugar free Cool Whip if you need something in the afternoon.
That is absolutely not what the Keto Reset does. The Keto Reset is about finding kind of a path to keto that feels good and also is enjoyable and also doesn't rule your life really.
Christopher: That's interesting. That is the way that I did it. I spent two years eating that way and I've come back to more of a mixed diet now. It's actually the mixed that I'm eating now is what made the transition into keto seamless. Once you're ready, as Mark would say, fat-adapted then going the extra step is not that far versus when I was eating pasta for dinner, sandwich for lunch, cereal for breakfast, going into keto, I just wouldn't been able to do it. I think I would have been in a hypoglycemic coma on my bedroom floor.
Lindsay: For sure. And that's why so many people try and then -- The thing is that people try and they feel like crap and they stop and they blame themselves. They say, "Well, I did something wrong." No, you didn't do something wrong. The only thing you did wrong was having unrealistic expectations about what the process would be like. But you didn't do anything wrong. That's what some of these people are telling you to do and your experience is absolutely your body's normal reaction to being like, "Oh crap, we don't have any glucose. What do we do? Everyone panic."
Christopher: Who's the book for? Is all of the super users and researchers and doctors that are listening to this podcast, are they going to enjoy this book or is this going to be the type of book that you shove in your parents face at Christmas and hope that something's going to stick?
Lindsay: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely for a general audience, I would say. It's not full of citations. It's not the keto bible where it's a lot of list of this paper showed this, this paper showed this. It's a very practical user guide. It's also just, of course, I should say, it's not for people who are just looking for a quick fix, of course, because it is a six-week program if you follow the whole thing and six weeks is a minimum.
It is for people who are genuinely looking to make a lifestyle change as well because just like the Primal Blueprint the food is really only one part of this. So, if you are looking for the science behind keto, this is probably not your book. But if you're looking to make keto a part of your lifestyle and also want to just learn about why keto is good for health and not just a weight loss hack, this is the book for you.
Christopher: Okay. So, to use the manual, maybe not a maintenance manual. Do you see where I'm going with that analogy? Maybe you could -- It's not all the time--
Lindsay: Is that a computer thing? It sounds like a computer thing.
Christopher: Yeah, it probably is a computer thing. I'll just stop with that now then, okay.
Lindsay: It's like the Primal Blueprint. It's a lifestyle guide. And the other thing is too, of course, I'm going to plug our Facebook group that I manage and I'm the benevolent overlord over there because we have this whole community built up around the book and in my opinion that's become sort of bigger than the book itself because it's everything that's in the book and it's all the social support that is really important to successfully achieving your goals.
If people are listening and are thinking about buying the book or have already bought the book and you're on Facebook and not in our group already, definitely come over there because I'm there and I have a couple excellent moderators who help me dig deeper understand the book, troubleshoot, do all those things that really will help take the book to the next level really.
Christopher: That's an amazing resource. I will, of course, link to everything you mentioned in the show notes for this episode. Is there anything else that you'd want people to know about?
Lindsay: If you are interested in health and interested in the keto diet or interested in how to train and do all those things with a low carb high fat approach, definitely come and check out our book. You can come lurk in our group for a while before you buy it. I just really would encourage people to think about this as a way of taking responsibility for your own health and feeling a sense of agency over the choices that you make and not letting other people tell you what to do but really doing the investigation for yourself is super important.
Christopher: I love that. Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Thank you.
Lindsay: Thank you, Chris. It's been awesome.
[1:05:01] End of Audio
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